This is my first attempt at writing a story...So E & OE

Deshpande finally got his onsite opportunity. This was the one he was eagerly waiting for. These kind of onsite assignments does not come to everyone in his organisation. Only the most talented and selected few gets the privilege. He worked hard for his selection. The selection process was very gruelling. But he cleared all the tests successfully.

Deshpande came from a remote village in Maharashtra. He toiled hard to get this job. He was well built and brave. Bhagat singh was his role model but Deshpande believed in GOD. Lord Rama was his favourite deity. He always felt an invisible hand guiding him throughtout his life..And now after hearing the good news of his selection he headed straight to the nearby temple to offer his prayers and thanks.

At the same time, thousands of kilometers away in a small city in the province of Baluchistan, Muhammed received a telephone call. His joy knew no bounds when he heard the news that he was selected for an assignment away from his country. Muhammed was as talented as Deshpande. He too survived the selection process. Just as he received the news, the loud speaker at the top of the minaret came to life. He thanked Allah for providing him the opportunity and rushed to the nearby mosque for his afternoon prayers.

Major Deshpande and Major Muhammed were selected to serve, in the UN peace keeping force,in Kosova. They would be posted in a town where the civil war was at its worst.

Both Deshpande and Muhammed prayed that the next century would be a peaceful one. The 20th century has already witnessed 2 world wars and was very close to having a third one. Just 10 more months were remaining for the dawn of the 21 century.

*****To be Continued********

P.S: The characters and the events in this story are fictious. Any resemblence to persons living or dead is pure unintentional. 

"How much blood will you shed to stay alive"

I like movies that make me think. Movies should not spoon feed with the story and the plot.. It's been almost two days since I watched SAW and I can get it out of my mind.. Don't get intimidated by the picture above.. The movie is a good thriller and I always wonder why Indian movie makers are not exploring the thriller genre.

The plot of the movie SAW is very simple.. Two guys wake up and find themselves shackled at opposite ends in an old stinky-looking restroom.. They find a dead body, clutching to a gun and a tape-recorder, between them.. They have no idea why they are tied up and what's happening to them.. And slowly the puzzle unravels.... It's a great movie with minimum characters and it seems the whole movie was shot in 18 days!!!

If you can sit thru some gory scenes, this movie is for you...

At last Yahoo is waking up from its slumber. Yahoo email is moving away from its "old" look & feel to catch up with Gmail. The new yahoo! Mail beta's user interface looks cool.. It closely resembles Microsoft Outlook. It also has an RSS feed. To try this out follow the steps given below.

(steps taken from here)

Login to Yahoo
Click on My account
Edit Member Information
In the General Preference Section, change  your  "language & Content" to "English - UK".
Save your preference and Exit.

The next time when you login you will get an invite to try out the new Beta.

You can always switch back to the old UI if you want.

Of late, there are lots of emails & articles  floating around ridiculing "Captain" Vijaykanth...Most of them are criticism of his movies, some are spoofs of movies with vijaykanth as the lead etc. Some of them are fun to read until the email that I received today morning... I received this email forwarded from more than one person... The email was supposed to be funny but eventually made me feel uneasy and rant about it..

The subject of the email was "IF U R WEEK HEARTED, PLS AVOID SEEING THE BELOW SNAPS. PLZZZZZZZZZZ"... The email had pictures of vijaykanth and his family with the comments for each pic from the author of the original email...Below are two pics with the comments that showed a bad taste of the author.

"Reason for poverty in India !!"

"See his kid's size....."

I assume that the author is not aware of the charity deeds that vijaykanth does..Below is a list from wikipedia.

India's national motto "Satyameva Jayate" (Truth Alone Triumphs) is being washed down the drains by the political parties that are contesting in the Tamil Nadu Assembly or rather Assemb-LIE elections.. Lots of false promises to woo voters..I pray that the common man is not sucked into this trap...There is no bigger drama than this which has lots of twists and turns...

DMK announces free color TVs, Rice for Rs 2 per kilo.. When everyone is wondering how this could be possible the honorable finance minister, just like a true politician, announces that the scheme is feasible...I think as a finance minister he should not make such a statement since it could tilt the scales in one party's favor.

Now AIADMK announces that they would give 10kg of free rice if bought back to power...Seems its a new offer even though it is not in the election manifesto....

Ultimately the common man is going to get nothing!!!

These are not SOPS to the public, but applying SOAPS, in colloquial terms!!

Cities have a very long history.. The first known cities were from Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley Civilization and china.. Since then there was no looking back..As different cultures evolved so did the cities.. Humans also started respecting cities by making them the capital for a state and then finally to their countries.

At one point of time the cities felt very alone and wanted relationships..Since cities were decent, unlike humans who are constantly looking for a mate, they wanted siblings...Their wish were granted and the concept of "twin cities" were introduced..But still humans always wanted the upper hand..So the concept of Siamese twins were prohibited.. The twin cities would always be seperated by a river between them!! Some of the famous twin cities in India are

• Hyderabad - Secundarabad
• Tirunelvelli - Palayamkottai
• Pune - Pimpri-chinchwad
• Ambasamudram - Kalidaikurichi
• Cuttack - Bhubaneshwar

For the complete list click here.

As time passed some cities were not happy with this agreement.. New technologies evolved and humans started travelling to space, the cities felt that they were cheated..This twin city treaty prohibited them from sharing "long-distance" relationships.. They formed an union and went on an complete strike.. As a result there were no growth in the cities. They started chocking up and some of them started dividing.. There was total chaos.

Finally to please them and unite them the concept of "Sister Cities" were introduced...Now any city geographically apart can be sisters if they share a common interest... Some of the sister cities are

• Bangalore - Minsk (Russia), Cleveland (USA)
• Chennai - Denver (USA)
• Delhi - London (UK), Chicago (USA)
• Mumbai - London, Los Angeles (USA), Yokohama (Japan), Berlin (Russia)
• Pune - San Jose (USA)

For the complete list click here.

For now the cities are happy and some of them have been united. Humans should take care of their cities properly because the cities could pull off any stunt at any moment..

This is the journey of a Simply-City to Complex-City.

Google Calendar is out.. It's very nice and easy to use. You can also export outlook calendars or iCal to google. I exported F1 season, world cup soccer and Indian holidays calendars from ical and google automatically adjusts the date/time to our default date-time.

Symbology has always been an interesting subject for mankind. It has helped us to study and know about our past and the various civilisations that humans have lived through.. However the general opinion was that it required specialized knowledge to study about symbols and their significance, until Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist came into the picture..After the huge success of Da Vinci Code, symbology,Iconology and religious metaphors has become an interesting topic for many people and I was no exception..

One religious metaphor that completely blew me away was the 10 incarnations or avatars of Lord Vishnu in the Hindu mythology.. To me personally, all these years, the 10 avatars were nothing but a small piece of information that GOD was a powerful entity who would help humans in the various ages!! But now I can look at subtle metaphors in them...

The vedas says that when GOD created earth, there was only water.. Then slowly mountains rose up and there were lands..Then animals came and then man evolved...

The first of the 10 avatars was matsya, a fish.. Why did God take the form of a fish? Because at first there was only water!

The second one was koorma, a tortoise.. Because lands came up and only an amphibian could live on both land and water..

The third one was varaha, a wild bore.. Wild animals were the next in the evolution cycle..

The fourth was narasimha... Half-man, Half-animal....Probably the next creature that evolved...

The fifth was vamana... a midget..

The sixth and the subsequent avatars were the Incarnations in human form..

The rule of nature is never broken and not only that it makes me believe that GOD is there in every creature... Scientists say that only humans can think, but to me if a fish has the capability to think, GOD to them would be matsya, the BIG FISH.. And yeah the theory of evolution has been propounded much before Charles Darwin...

One thing that greatly influenced me to move to my own domain is google analytics. I got an invitation from google but couldn't use it with my previous hosting provider because my blog was hosted as a sub-domain.

Now having my own domain, I configured it in google analytics and I am greatly impressed with all the reports that it chunks out for me. Since I cannot share my reports page, which is one of the terms and conditions with google when you sign up, below is the sample report image from google.

Of course there are lots of web site analysis and optimization tools available but not sure how they fare up against google. Try this out and look for yourself. You can use google analytics only by invitation. You might get out soon.

Now I have my own space in the web. I have moved from http://aspspider.net/karthik to my own domain ..Please update your feeds and thanks for visiting.

I already mentioned about Zoho Creator in one of my earlier posts. I tried playing with Zoho Sheet and it looks cool. It is a Web version of the Excel spreadsheet. You can try some stuff with the demo user. Here is a simple spreadsheet that I created. I haven't tried out all the features yet. I see some features missing but of course it's still in Beta and I expect them to be included as it evolves.

Looks like there are quite a list of applications from zoho.

Zoho Writer

Zoho CRM

Zoho Planner

Zoho Sheet

Zoho Virtual Office

Zoho Creator

Zoho Polls

The only thing that I don't like is that you have to sign-up individually for every single application..Why don't they make it a single-sign on portal?

Most of the Mechanical & Automobile engineering students and engineers are aware of the 4 stroke IC Engine that we find in our automobiles. 4 strokes denotes the number of times the piston in the Engine chamber moves to make a complete combustion Cycle. In layman terms..

Stroke 1 (Intake) - The piston in the cylinder moves downwards sucking in air/fuel mixture.

Stroke 2 (Compression) - The piston then moves up compressing the air/fuel mixture to a high pressure.

Stroke 3 (Combustion) - A spark-plug ignites the high pressure air/fuel mixture. A combustion takes place and the piston is forced downwards. The piston is attached to a crank shaft which makes a rotation of the wheel.

Stroke 4 (Exhaust) - The piston moves upwards releasing the byproducts of the combustion mixture.

Then stroke 1 takes place and this keeps going on and on..

75 year old Bruce Crower who has lived his life building race engines woke up one particular morning, after a dream, with an idea that could change the 4 stroke engine to a 6 stroke engine. The idea is very simple.

Stroke 5 (Expansion) - After the completion of 4 strokes Bruce injected water into the chamber. Since the chamber is already heated up, the water is instantly coverted into steam and expands itself there by pushing the piston downwards for a second power stroke.

Stroke 6 (Exhaust) - The piston then moves upwards and releases the exhaust.

This is one hell of an idea. Wonder why I don't get dreams like that. All I get is nightmares!!!

For more information please read this.

For more information on IC Engines read this.

Ever heard of Project Bovine? I am sure many of us would have heard of the Google Compute project. This is where you donate/share a part of your computer processing power, when your computer is idle, to help other "research" projects. Well...This is not a new concept by google. Distributed.net seems to be the internet's first general purpose distributed computing project.

Now when we have a super-computer that does time-sharing with other idle computers and utilizes their processing power, how long will it take to crack a password?

Let's say I have a 7 letter password (all small characters), there could be 8 billion combinations and it might take only 8 secs to crack your password.

Here is an interesting article on how long your password can withstand these brute force attacks.

Now Project Bovine RC5-64 from distributed.net which is considered the fastest computer on earth has recently reached a speed of 76.1 Billion passwords per second!!

Time to change my passwords.....

The wait is over.. Google Earth has finally recognised chennai.. You can see high-resolution images of chennai from google earth . But.... The data snap shot that google has is probably more than 3 years old!!! Below is the view of my apartment complex...I can only see the early construction phase..The fully constructed apartment complex is more than 3 yrs old..

This sucks!! And I am disappointed with Google.. Wonder when they would refresh their data!!

Two sites that I visit frequently are digg and del.icio.us. It was a tiring affair to keep looking at these sites for new updates. Thanks to DiggLicious (a blend of digg and del.icio.us) , now I can look at the real time updates happening at both these sites in a single browser window.

This is a site that u should definetely digg...err...tag...err...bookmark...Too many jargons...

This is what I have been looking for.. A great way to organize my stuff. Another web 2.0 application. We can create a new application or copy an existing template and model it. Great stuff..

Here are my applications. Thanks to Krithiga for the template.

Here is a one stop resource for 30 Ajax Tutorials. Great Collection of tutorials.

This  is a huge leap from version 1.1. Now developers are not tied to using Microsoft Products for storing data. This provides a lot of flexibilty to the architects.. I particularly like the Session State Provider where now I can store session data in an Oracle Database. Way to go!!!